Freaks at the circus

In THE NEWS BLOG, Steve Gilliard has a couple of very thoughtful posts about the racism of the core of the Hurricane Katrina crisis -- it is also, of course, at the core of the inner city mob myth I just posted about below.
Gilliard makes the point that the humanitarial disaster of Katrina has ripped away the mask of America --

The funny thing about crisis is that you have to put your cards on the table. The NRO [National Review Online] Klavern put theirs out. Straight up and with no question: Niggers suck, and they're proud to say it. Barbara Bush's mask of amiability was also ripped off this week. Her colonialist attitude towards her fellow Americans was recorded live. Anyone want to call Kitty Kelley a liar now? And the sheriff of Gretna, LA proved that every country has war criminals. most just don't have a war to commit crime in . . . The nation's leading black conservative commentators have been as quiet as door mice since this happened . . . Mehlman would be laughed out of the room if he said the GOP was a party of inclusion. Please. You had the President's mother speaking like a Kenyan colonist in a village . . . Bush showed he's a human clusterfuck and his government seems to run on the political prinicples of Mobuto Sese Seko, creator of Zaire, the world's first kleptocracy. So the old joke about seeing a nuclear explosion and kissing your ass goodbye seems appropriate. Too bad the same can be said for hurricane warnings as well. After 9/11, FEMA as dumping ground was not such a good idea. Now, after Katrina, we know it can kill people.

and he also notes how poorly the right blogosphere has responded.

. . . Sometimes the world changes before your eyes. December 7th was such a day, November 22nd was one, so was July 4th. Those days didn't just change America, they changed the way we saw the world. The right blogosphere, used to defending Bush, is caught on the wrong side here and not only do they don't know it, they keep digging deeper . . . Everyone from the Southern Baptist Convention to MTV are helping to raise money and feed people. The only people not doing anything are the righties . . . This is the most serious domestic crisis since Pearl Harbor, and these folks are acting like it's still Ok to be Bund members. They don't get that everything changed after Bush failed to help the Katrina survivors. The right bloggers are treating this as politics. A lot of people, left and right, realize the implications here, and Bush is being hammered because of this. If there had been a terrorist attack on a chemical plant or if an LNG tanker, FEMA's inaction would have killed thousands of people from untreated trauma injuries. This is no longer about politics, but survival . . . New Orleans is gone. I mean, a unique way of life is gone. It doesn't get much more serious than this. And the right bloggers are making jokes and arguing about buses . . . In this most serious of times, the right bloggers are looking like freaks at the circus.